Budukh or Budugh (Будад мез, ''Budad mez'') is a Samur language of the Northeast Caucasian language family spoken in parts of the

Quba Rayon Quba District (; az, Quba rayonu) is one of the 66 districts of Azerbaijan. It is located in the north-east of the country and belongs to the Guba-Khachmaz Economic Region. The district borders the districts of Qusar, Qabala, Ismayilli, Sham ...

Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of th ...

. It is spoken by about 200 of approximately 1,000 ethnic Budukhs. Budukh is a severely

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

,The sociolinguistic situation of the Budukh in Azerbaijan
/ref> and classified as such by

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.UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

Grammar

Gender and agreement

Authier (2010) reports that Budugh has six 'gender-number' classes: *human masculine, *human adult feminine, *animate (which includes animals, plants, and non-adult human females, as well as some abstract nouns), *inanimate, *nonhuman plural, *human plural. Verbs normally agree with their

absolutive In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...

argument (intransitive subject or transitive object) in gender. In the following examples, the verb 'beat' shows animate agreement with 'donkey' and non-human plural agreement with 'donkeys'. Compare these examples with the following, where the verb agrees with the intransitive subject:

Verb agreement

Budukh verbs typically agree with a single argument, the absolutive. In the agreement paradigms, the majority of verbs show no overt agreement for the masculine, neuter, and nonhuman plural. Consider the following paradigm for the verb 'keep' in the perfective (Authier 2009): In this paradigm, /ˤa/ is a preverb which must appear with the verb root /q/ 'keep', and the agreement morphology appears between the preverb and the root. Due to historical changes, the relationships between the various members of an agreement paradigm are often more complex and show changes of vowel and/or consonant. The following perfective paradigm for 'go' shows this (with the reconstructed form shown after the *)

Word order

Budukh is an SOV language, as seen in the following example: It has possessors before possessed nouns: Adjectives appear before the nouns that they modify:

References

*Authier, Gilles. 2009. Development of Introflexion (Root-and-pattern Morphology) in Budugh Verbs http://www.digitorient.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/introflexionBudugh.doc *Authier, Gilles. 2010. Finite and Non-Finite: Prosodic Distinctions on Budugh Verb Stems. In ''Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy: Syntax and Pragmatics'', ed. by Isabelle Bril. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp 143–164.

External links

Budukh basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Budukh Language Northeast Caucasian languages Languages of Azerbaijan Endangered Caucasian languages